Search results for ""Medieval Institute Publications""

Concentrating on major figures of women in The Faerie Queene, together with the figures constellated around them, Anderson's Narrative Figuration explores the contribution of Spenser's epic romance to an appreciation of women's plights and possibilities in the age of Elizabeth. Taken together, their stories have a meaningful tale to tell about the function of narrative, which proves central to figuration in the still moving, metamorphic poem that Spenser created.

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The Digby Play of Mary Magdalene is a rare surviving example of the Middle English saint play. Its origins and auspices remain unknown, but linguistic evidence situates the play in the now widely-recognized late medieval East Anglian dramatic tradition. Beyond its importance for the history of early English drama, the Digby Mary Magdalene provides a window on the deep embedding of biblical drama and performance in late medieval devotional practices, social aspiration and critique, and religious discourses. Taking full advantage of the saint’s complex symbolism and rich resources of late medieval religious culture, the Digby Mary Magdalene play has attracted attention from scholars in a variety of disciplines. Yet until now an accessible, affordable edition of the play has been beyond their reach. Fully annotated and extensively glossed, this edition is an essential resource for the study of late medieval English religious drama.

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Guillaume de Machaut, a pioneer of a new school of lyric compositions, is the most important poet and composer of late medieval France. This long overdue new edition of Machaut's twenty-three motets, the largest surviving collection of such works by a single composer in this period, is based on the most authoritative of the surviving manuscripts and is designed to meet the needs both of advanced scholars and musicians as well as students and performers. This user-friendly format indicates variants on the scores and has a layout that makes each work's structure clearly visible; the lyrics, with full English translation, are presented at the end of each work. The supporting materials include: an introduction that discusses the life of the author and his artistic achievement and provides fresh insights into the poetry and music of the motets; notes for their performance and pronunciation; an art-historical commentary on the accompanying manuscript illuminations; and detailed commentaries, including collation of manuscript variants, for each motet.

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The Towneley plays are a collection of biblical plays in the Huntington Library's MS HM 1, a manuscript once owned by the Towneley family of Towneley Hall, Lancashire. Once thought to constitute a cycle of plays from the town of Wakefield in Yorkshire's West Riding, the collection includes some of the best-known examples of medieval English drama, including the much-anthologized Second Shepherds Play.

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An innovative volume of fifteen interdisciplinary essays at the nexus of material culture, performance studies, and game theory, Playthings in Early Modernity emphasizes the rules of the game(s) as well as the breaking of those rules. Thus, the titular "plaything" is understood as both an object and a person, and play, in the early modern world, is treated not merely as a pastime, a leisurely pursuit, but as a pivotal part of daily life, a strategic psychosocial endeavor.

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During the Frankish Crusader period, Cistercian monks built and developed the monastery of Zaraka in Greece for approximately forty years and were followed first by squatters, then by a seventeenth-century cemetery. The goal of this study has been to identify where the monks came from, how they lived, and why they left so suddenly.

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This volume develops G. R. Russom's contributions to early English meter and style, including his fundamental reworkings and rethinkings of accepted and oft-repeated mantras, including his word-foot theory, concern for the late medieval context for alliterative meter, and the linguistics of punctuation and translation as applied to Old English texts. Ten eminent scholars from across the field take up Russom's ideas to lead readers in new and exciting directions.

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Mary of Nemmegen, a prose condensation in English of the Middle Dutch play Mariken van Nieumeghen, is an important example of the literature that was imported from Holland in the early part of the sixteenth century. It also may be compared to Everyman, described as a treatise "in the manner of a moral play." Mary of Nemmegen is an analogue of the Faustus story. As such, it is also a window on the obsession in its own time with the occult.

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Focusing on language's political power, these essays discuss how representation, through language norms, plays and court spectacles, manipulations and adaptations of texts and images, both constitutes and reflects a cultural milieu. The volume brings together various disciplinary approaches, offering a complex appreciation of these questions. While a core of the essays focuses on France, the contributions engage a broad range of geographical contexts, from Byzantium to eastern Germany and England from the early centuries of the Common Era to the seventeenth century, revealing the prevalence and persistence of the key interconnected issues of images and authority. Contributors: Carla Bozzolo; Philippe Caron; Robert L. A. Clark; Paul Cohen; Thomas Conley; Jean-Philippe Genet; Douglas Kibbee; Gillette Labory; Nicole Pons; Mara R. Wade.

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Giovanni Villani's New Chronicle traces the history of Florence, Italy, and Europe over a vast sweep of time - from the destruction of the Tower of Babel to the outbreak of the Black Death. This final book, which covers one of the most dramatic periods of the early fourteenth century, is a narrative of transformation, of crisis, in which the author, like many of his contemporaries in the mid-fourteenth century, perceives the punishing hand of God. At the same time, this book, composed by Villani as events were unfolding, reveals - in its attention to detail, in its attempted impartiality, in its desire to make sense of events rather than simply document them - the glimmers of a new historical sensibility.

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British Library MS Harley 2253 is one of the most important literary works to survive from the English medieval era. In rarity, quality, and abundance, its secular love lyrics comprise an unrivaled collection. Intermingled with them are contemporary political songs as well as delicate lyrics designed to inspire religious devotion.

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One of the most engaging Middle English crusading poems, Richard Coer de Lyon recounts in verse the exploits, both historical and fanciful, of Richard I, king of England. While Richard's participation in the Third Crusade serves as its main subject, the poem disrupts its historical narrative with a number of fabulous interpolations, two of which are particularly notorious: the depiction of Richard's mother as a demon, and the portrayal of the king himself as a voracious cannibal. Once the source of critical disparagement, the poem's blending of history and fantasy—its historical distortions—have recently become the focus of renewed interest in the poem. With a substantial introduction and comprehensive explanatory and textual notes, this new edition of Richard Coer de Lyon signally contributes to the reappraisal and understanding of what became—during the centuries-long process of its composition—one of the most popular of medieval romances.

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As Hanks and Jesmok note in their introduction, "pursuing opponents and pursuing love move the Morte's narrative, but the work's richness comes from its romance and tragic elements: the human quest for maturity and fulfillment and those uncontrollable forces that undermine the quest and destroy the dream. Malory's use of myth and magic to explore these themes has received extensive scholarly attention, but his views on and thematic use of Christianity have long needed a closer look."

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Comparative Perspectives on History and Historians: Essays in Memory of Bryce Lyon (1920-2007) features a section of appreciations of Bryce Lyon from the three editors, R. C. Van Caenegem, and Walter Prevenier, followed by three sections on the major areas on which Lyon's research concentrated: the legacy of Henri Pirenne, constitutional and legal history of England and the Continent, and the economic history of the Low Countries. Original essays by Bernard S. Bachrach, David S. Bachrach, Jan Dumolyn, Caroline Dunn, Jelle Haemers, John H. A. Munro, James M. Murray, Anthony Musson, David Nicholas, W. Mark Ormrod, Walter Prevenier, Jeff Rider, Don C. Skemer, and Marci Sortor deepen our understanding of Lyon's career and significance and further our knowledge of the areas in which he worked.

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The Middle Ages provided an important, if complex, set of literary and historiographic models for early modern authors, although the early modern authors responded to the alien political, religious, and cultural landscape of medieval England through their more present ideological concerns. From Shakespeare's manipulation of his medieval source material to Protestant responses to medieval Catholicism, this collection of essays explores the ways that early modern English writers responded to the medieval English literary and historical record, dealing with topics such as historiographic bias, print history, intertextuality, and cultural history.

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Clifford Davidson's newly revised and expanded edition of A Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge makes available the most significant text of dramatic criticism in Middle English. A polemic against the playing of "miraclis," the Tretise is frequently linked to the Wycliffite or Lollard movements of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. In an essay on the text's dialect, Paul A. Johnston, Jr. definitively identifies the Tretise as the work of two authors who lived in adjacent counties in the Midlands.

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John Lydgate is known as the most distinguished poet of fifteenth-century England. This volume presents his brilliant and underappreciated dramatic texts written for both private and public entertainment, encompassing both religious and secular topics. This is the first time since 1934 that many of these poems have been reprinted or reedited. They are published here with an extensive gloss and notes, as well as a glossary and an introduction, making them accessible to a new generation of students of the Middle Ages. These works are indispensible to any study of medieval English drama.

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Since its rediscovery by nineteenth-century scholarship, Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 61 has never been ignored, though it has also not gained a great deal of notoriety beyond the scholars of Middle English romance. It is hoped that the present volume will encourage study of the entire manuscript as a valuable witness to the devotional habits, cultural values, and popular tastes of late medieval England.

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While the essays offered in this collection vary in subject, discipline, and methodological approach, they center on the interpretation of the material world, whether that materiality appears in literature, stone, or the artifacts removed from an archaeological dig. The essay deal mainly with the Germanic and Celtic worlds, but incorporate motifs from Eastern Christian and Roman cultures. Contributors address the themes of time in history; societal and ideological change and continuity; iconic style and polysemous textuality; symbolic and representational interpretation; gender-specific economic production; definitions of social and political structures; and social processes of eclecticism and adaptation. Hence the approaches are interdisciplinary, contextual, comparative, and fluid in their integration of texts and images where the text represented is as crucial to the meaning as is the image or object; they therefore represent the study of the material culture of the Anglo-Saxon period at its best. The variety of disciplines represented in the essays and the range of topics covered by the individual scholars give some indication of the enormous scope of the scholarship of Rosemary Cramp, in whose honor this volume was produced. Readers will find that the subjects dealt with resonate with each other in interesting and complex ways. It is an invaluable contribution to scholars of Anglo-Saxon culture and archaeology.

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The complete text of John Gower's poem is a three-volume edition, including all Latin components-with translations-of this bilingual text and extensive glosses, bibliography and explanatory notes. Volume 1 contains the Prologue and Books 1 and 8, in effect the overall structure of Gower's poem.

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The complete text of John Gower's Confessio Amantis is a 3-volume edition, including all Latin components - with translations - of this bilingual poem and extensive glosses, bibliography, and explanatory notes. Volume 3 contains Books 5, 6, and 7, which follow another kind of development as Gower shifts from romance banter and formulaic confession to philosophical inquiry.

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Scottish poet William Dunbar is usually considered one of the most important figures of fifteenth-century British literature, and may lay claim to being the finest lyric poet writing in English in the century and half between the death of Chaucer in 1400 and the appearance of Tottel's Miscellany in 1557. Dunbar's poems offer vivid depictions of late medieval Scottish society and serve up a striking pageant of colorful figures at the court of James IV (r. 1488-1513), with which he was associated for much of his adult life. The poems are remarkable both for their diversity and variability and for their multiplicity of voices, styles, and tones. The great variety of poems within Dunbar's canon includes religious hymns of exaltation, moral poems on a wide range of serious themes, comic and parodic poems of extreme salaciousness and scatological coarseness, general satires against the times, and satires with much more specific targets, often a single individual. This edition of eighty-four poems attributed to Dunbar includes extensive background material and explanatory notes that are sure to be of interest to students and Dunbar enthusiasts alike. The edition is rounded out with textual notes, an index of first lines, and a glossary.

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The poem that Richard Maidstone wrote on the metropolitan crisis of 1392 reports information about the royal entry that concluded the crisis in greater detail than any other source. The poem is not primarily a report, however; like Maidstone's other writings, it is above all an ideologically driven literary intervention, produced at a particular moment, addressing a particular political circumstance. Maidstone's Concordia shows Anglo-Latin poetry, on a specific occasion, in the process of making itself a public poetry a broadly appealing, flexible, legible medium for addressing public issues.

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John Capgrave's The Life of Saint Katherine, written c. 1463 in Lynn in Norfolk, is, according to the editor, . . . the longest and most intricate Katherine legend written during the Middle Ages, either in Latin or in any vernacular. In telling the story of the life of the virgin martyr, Katherine, Capgrave uses many of the tropes that mark the enormously popular genre of hagiography as it was written throughout the Middle Ages. Given his learning, however, and his evident acquaintance with the works of Chaucer, Lydgate, and Osburn Bokenham, and his knowledge of medieval drama, and the possibility that he knew of The Book of Margery Kempe, this saint's life should be particularly interesting to students of late Middle English culture, especially literature. In the course of his encyclopedic narrative, in which he evidently sought to appeal to a broad audience in sophisticated, if provincial, Norfolk, Capgrave inserts digressions on Greek and Roman history; on just and unjust rule and justifiable vs. unjustifiable rebellion; on child care; on medieval English feasts, jousts, and pageants; and on the role(s) of women.

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This collection of essays was the first published in North America that sought to describe the methodology and some results of a scholarly enterprise hailed in the preface to the volume as one of the most vibrant, innovative, and productive movements in medieval scholarship at the present time.Under the direction of Monique Bourin an international team of scholars has been considering onomastics from the perspective of history rather than that of linguistics or philology. By examining data on both the micro and macro levels, researchers are beginning to describe how medieval patterns of naming have implications for our understanding of family relationships, kinship, and larger social structures that were not fully realized by earlier scholars.

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Fitted with ample introductions, notes, and glosses, this volume will make an excellent text for a class of any level on Middle English romance. This excellent edition includes King Horn, Havelok the Dane, Bevis of Hampton, and Athelston. These romances all deal with the Matter of Britain—that is, they celebrate action and adventure tales taking place in England. Featuring all the hallmarks of a good romance, these works include disinherited nobles, thrilling battles, love stories, dragons, and all sorts of marvels and adventures. Spanning the mid thirteenth to the late fourteenth century, these works provide an excellent cross section of the wonderful world of Middle English romances featuring the escapades of their fantastical countrymen.

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For all its spiritual cheerfulness and obvious importance as a tale to conclude tales, a last word from a notable maker of words, The Parson's Tale seems to have inspired sentence and solaas in remarkably few critics. This volume rejects the tradition that assumes the tale to be of questionable literary value. The studies included span the range of Parson's Tale criticism from the textual, to the philological, to the hermeneutical. What they share is the assumption that if one is to understand the role of The Parson's Tale, one must begin by accepting the language and method by which Chaucer fashioned it. This rethinking of traditional scholarship on this crucial aspect of The Canterbury Tales will be of great interest to Chaucer scholars and students of medieval literature.

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This anthology aims to add flesh to the bones and the supplements, reservations, and alternatives for a deeper understanding of the tradition of natural law throughout the medieval period. It runs contrary to the opinion so commonly held since the Renaissance, that any tradition deemed medieval has little or even nothing to offer to contemporary needs and interests. The essays contained herein put to bed such a notion with fresh and interesting takes on Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, natural law in the traditions of Golden Age Spain, and more.

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In a series of essays readers will find information about modern scholarship on the subject of chivalry and various suggestions for ways to teach some familiar and unfamiliar chivalric materials. Short bibliographies are provided for teachers' further use.

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The study of popular hymnody is remote not only from contemporary experience but also from very many contemporary scholars. A great deal of this remove stems from the complicated origins and history of this important genre. The Monophonic Lauda aims to present for the first time an English study of the form, as such a text has not been available before. This also necessitates an exploration of previous scholarship on the lauda, though the book is not devoted to this particular exercise. The volume is well illustrated, including musical notation and black-and-white plates.

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This illustrated volume intelligently provides a much-needed introduction to what may have been the most popular variety of drama in the Middle Ages: the saint play. A comprehensive and collaborative survey is provided with an emphasis on interdisciplinary study rather than only literary analysis. While the saint play in England is the connecting theme of the volume, the papers explore other topics necessary to fully understand the culture of the saint play, such as the genre as manifest on the continent, including plays in French, Italian, and German.

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Each of these diverse essays confronts important issues in the study of medieval art, literature, and drama. The topics covered include the symbolism of scatological illustration in Gothic manuscripts (Karl Wentersdorf), connections between word and picture in religious art (Roger Ellis), and the relationship perceived between divine and human creativity (R. W. Hanning), while Clifford Davidson provides an exploration in the phenomenology of space and time in medieval theater.

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Before he suddenly passed away, John W. Robinson was working on a manuscript that he saw as effecting a marriage between the dramatic and the theatrical, as he felt there was too large a divide between literary scholars and practitioners of the theater. In it, Robinson stated that his purpose it to expound as plays the New Testament plays of the Wakefield Master and some of the related York plays, including two by the York Realist. . . . hop[ing] to show that the meaning and effect of the Wakefield Master's and York Realist's plays will not appear unless they are approached with the understanding that they were performed, with some idea of how they were performed, and with some appreciation of what they meant to a medieval audience. That manuscript is presented here, a close study of eight plays and the elements Robinson considers essential to performance: playwright, sponsors, location, plot, script, players, and audience.

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This richly illustrated book surveys representations of the stage and acting from manuscript illuminations, stained glass, sculpture, woodcarving, wall paintings, and the woodcuts that appear in playbooks produced by the first English printers.

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Strife occurs everywhere among characters in The Canterbury Tales, in the stories as well as the links between them. Characters seem always ready to dispute, contradict, declaim, and contend about almost anything. A competitive spirit suffuses the work, from the tale-telling among pilgrims and the personal rivalries that develop on the pilgrimage to the conflicts, beguilings, and one-uppings that go on in the tales. By understanding the rivalries of the Canterbury world, we may then recognize why Chaucer so insists on the individuality of the characters he creates, why so many characters (rightly or wrongly) resist structures, and why they challenge or reject social dogmas, often overturning them. The essays that make up this collection offer several provocative interpretations of the rivalrous and rebellious spirits that inhabit the worlds of Chaucer's tales. The volume is intended for the dedicated teacher of Chaucer as well as for the specialist in medieval English studies. As Chaucer's poem displays the contestive spirit of human affairs, so the collective spirit of these essays reflects vigorous debate and multi-faceted challenge.

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Strife occurs everywhere among characters in The Canterbury Tales, in the stories as well as the links between them. Characters seem always ready to dispute, contradict, declaim, and contend about almost anything. A competitive spirit suffuses the work, from the tale-telling among pilgrims and the personal rivalries that develop on the pilgrimage to the conflicts, beguilings, and one-uppings that go on in the tales. By understanding the rivalries of the Canterbury world, we may then recognize why Chaucer so insists on the individuality of the characters he creates, why so many characters (rightly or wrongly) resist structures, and why they challenge or reject social dogmas, often overturning them. The essays that make up this collection offer several provocative interpretations of the rivalrous and rebellious spirits that inhabit the worlds of Chaucer’s tales. The volume is intended for the dedicated teacher of Chaucer as well as for the specialist in medieval English studies. As Chaucer’s poem displays the contestive spirit of human affairs, so the collective spirit of these essays reflects vigorous debate and multi-faceted challenge.

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In his foreword to the volume, Clifford Davidson praises Guilfoyle's application of the concept of scenic form in her study of Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear, and her exposition of Shakespeare's historical consciousness, noting her sensitive examination of the shape of the playwright's scenes when placed against traditional visual configurations and related textual resonances. Any student of Shakespeare will benefit from the nuanced study of his imagery and how it helps to color his characters and the action in his plays.

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Included here are the texts, translations, musical transcriptions, and facsimiles of the Swedish music-dramas for Holy Week and Easter: Depositio, Elevatio, and Visitatio Sepulchri.

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This work-a parallel-text edition that contains all four versions of Piers Plowman-constitutes a major enterprise of textual scholarship and will provide for students of Langland a modern equivalent to Skeat's standard edition of 1886. This revised and corrected three-volume set is specifically designed to facilitate study of the parallel text (Volume 1) alongside both the textual notes (Volume 2, part 1) and the commentary/glossary (Volume 2, part 2), and is intended to make the entire edition available to as many students of Langland as possible.

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The abbreviated Psalms commentary by Honorius Augustodunensis (ca. 1070 - ca. 1140)-a redaction of his own, much larger commentary on the entire Psalter-participates in a long tradition of Christian interpretation of the Book of Psalms. A prolific author closely associated with Anselm of Canterbury, Rupert of Deutz, and Gilbert of Poitiers, Honorius wrote a massive commentary on the Psalms when the so-called "school of Laon" was at work on the Glossa ordinaria. Honorius's work shares the academic interest of that school, while simultaneously serving the devotion of the Benedictine Reform. His Exposition of Selected Psalms highlights a tripartite division of the Psalter, even as it discovers in the psalms an apocalypticism fitting to the Church in its last age.

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One of the most compelling and provocative books of twelfth-century England, the Markyate Psalter was probably produced at St. Albans Abbey between 1120 and 1140. Heralded as a high point of English Romanesque illumination, the manuscript contains the Chanson de St. Alexis. Leading scholars of twelfth-century manuscript studies explore the Psalter, understanding it through new methodologies, pursuing innovative lines of inquiry. The collection shines fresh light on a well-known manuscript, and broadens the discourse about the book and its readers.

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Beginning in 1987, the yearbook was the preeminent venue for scholarship on "Piers Plowman"; on related poems in the tradition of didactic alliterative verse and on the historical, religious, and intellectual contexts in which such poems were produced in late medieval England. Each volume contains essays, reviews and an annotated bibliography.

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From 1987, the yearbook was the preeminent venue for scholarship on "Piers Plowman"; on related poems in the tradition of didactic alliterative verse, and on the historical, religious and intellectual contexts in which such poems were produced in late medieval England. Each volume contains essays, reviews and an annotated bibliography.

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Beginning in 1987, the yearbook was the preeminent venue for scholarship on "Piers Plowman"; on related poems in the tradition of didactic alliterative verse and on the historical, religious, and intellectual contexts in which such poems were produced in late medieval England. Each volume contains essays, reviews and an annotated bibliography.

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One of the greatest medieval drama cycles in England was mounted annually at Coventry at Corpus Christi until suppressed in 1579, and is of particular importance because it was almost certainly seen by William Shakespeare when he was a boy in nearby Stratford-upon-Avon. The two extant pageants from this cycle have been re-edited and are presented here for the first time in a modern critical edition. The introduction provides a full survey of knowledge about the Coventry cycle from the local dramatic records and other sources of information. Comprehensive critical and textual notes are included as well as a select bibliography and glossary. Appendices print the earliest fragments of the Weavers' pageant, texts of royal entries from the Coventry Leet Book, the songs (including the famous Coventry Carol) from the Shearmen and Taylors' pageant, and an analysis of various versions of the Doctors play.

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Eibinder states in her lecture that over the thirteenth century, the scattered poetic remains that document persecutions against Jews in royal France often refer to burning books. Young poet Meir ben Baruch of Rothenburg captured the tone of mourning and bereavement following the events of 1242 . . . The polemical and satirical restlessness of DaPiera's poems, the exquisite lyrical imagery of HaLevi's Zionide lament, the longing devotion to the Beloved of vernacular songs, all fuse in a remarkable tribute to Jewish study and students.

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Each of these diverse essays confronts important issues in the study of medieval art, literature, and drama. The topics covered include the symbolism of scatological illustration in Gothic manuscripts (Karl Wentersdorf), connections between word and picture in religious art (Roger Ellis), and the relationship perceived between divine and human creativity (R. W. Hanning), while Clifford Davidson provides an exploration in the phenomenology of space and time in medieval theater.

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In bringing together these papers, Archaeological Approaches to Medieval Europe demonstrates the need for active participation of different disciplines in formulating questions about and interpretations of material culture in the Middle Ages. It celebrates the coming of age of historical archaeology, of which medieval archaeology is a subdiscipline. The papers collected are striking for their diversity of approaches and subject matter. They reflect the spirit of an open area excavation where specialists from many disciplines with diverging methodologies meet and work side by side. No paper is specifically devoted to an excavation report, although the majority of contributors made use of data from such reports. The collection is intended primarily as a sampler, but a thematic unity emerges around the potential of archaeological approaches to contribute to a political ecology of the medieval period. The volume is an indispensable offering for archaeologists and historians of the Middle Ages seeking an appraisal of the state of the young discipline of medieval archaeology.

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